Video: Top Gear Takes Bus Race to Rally Track

There are all kinds of vehicles that you will find on London’s roads. You’ll find people speeding around town in their Italian supercars. You’ll find people booting around town in economical diesel hatchbacks. And then you’ll see people riding the bus. Just because you take public transit doesn’t mean that you should be making any real sacrifices, right?

The Mayor of London is apparently looking for the best buses to fill the British city’s roads, so the crew at Top Gear took it upon themselves to determine which was the best bus of all. Sure, they could have run it through a series of usability tests, looking at environmental concerns and how well the bus would handle through busy London streets, but that’s not the Top Gear way. They test vehicles by taking them to the track.

Mega-commuters like these buses are no exception. In the clip below, we find Richard Hammond enlisting the help of a few rally drivers to see which bus reigns supreme. You’ve got the regular single-decker, a shorter community bus, London’s famous double-decker, and one of those longer buses that bends in the middle.

In purely unscientific fashion, all four of these big honking things takes to the track at the same time and they remain relatively civil for the first couple of laps. They pull real close and they really take the multi-passenger buses (with no passengers, thankfully) to the limit. I’d think that the double-decker would be the first to tip over under such extreme conditions, but that’s not the one that goes on two wheels at one point.